GREGORY LAB
Lab Projects
VIRAL DISCOVERY
Key to studying the virome is uncovering all the viruses present in an ecosystem. Nonetheless, viral discovery has long been difficult due to the lack of a universal marker gene across viruses. While existing tools are improving year by year via the expansion of viral genome databases, the Integrative Viromics Lab is working on creating a novel bioinformatic pipeline for viral discovery. This pipeline will complement existing viral discovery tools and ultimately help us better detect viruses across all ecosystems.
TOP DOWN HOLISTIC ANALYSIS
We use computational approaches to interrogate ‘omics datasets to describe viral communities across different ecosystems. We also use these ‘omic datasets to generate hypotheses for how viruses interact with different microorganisms and players in the ecosystem. These hypotheses will eventually be tested in our synthetic communities.
BOTTOM UP
SYNTHETIC
COMMUNITIES
The Integrative Viromics lab is working to develop a gut phage culture collection that covers the breadth of diversity of phages in the human gut. We are working on phenotyping the phages in mono-, co-, and community-cultures. We ultimately hope to develop stable synthetic human gut virome communities that we can use to test the hypotheses generated from our holistic analyses.